Examinations of electrical characteristics of an electronic circuit, such as an IC or an LSI formed on a semiconductor wafer, have been typically carried out by the use of examination devices having a probe card. The probe card typically comprises plurality of probe pins to be contacted to a large number of electrodes on a wafer, and a circuit board transmits an electric signal to each probe for examination. The examination of the electric circuit on the wafer has been carried out in such way that each electrode of the wafer are brought into contact with each probe pin, and an electrical signal is transmitted from the circuit board to each probe.
In recent years, spacing between electrodes of an electronic circuit on a wafer are getting smaller, and are now down to approximately tens of μm to 100 μm due to miniaturization. Spacing for probes of the probe card need to be reduced to accommodate this, however, the spacing for terminals of a circuit board corresponding the probes can only be, for example, reduced to approximately 0.5 mm because it is necessary to maintain insulation between adjacent terminals while ensuring an adequate size of the terminal itself.
Under these circumstances, it has been proposed in Japanese published unexamined patent application No. 2004-191401 and so on to provide an interposer having an elasticity and a contactor having a fine wiring on the lower face side of the circuit board and mounting a probe on the lower face of the contactor. A lower face terminal of the circuit board is formed on the contactor, and a fine wiring is formed inside of the contactor to connect the upper face terminal and the lower face terminal. By this contactor internal wiring, wider spacing for the terminal of the circuit board is converted into small spacing for the electrode on the wafer.
However, in the above probe card, manufacturing has been taking time because it is necessary to form very complicated and fine wiring. Also, the probe card has become costly due to the necessity for designing a complicated wiring pattern and a complicated manufacturing process.
The present invention has been made in consideration of such points, and it is therefore an objective of the present invention to provide a probe card that can respond to an examination object such as a wafer with small electrodes spacing, and is also easy to manufacture and inexpensive.